How do you design the rise and fall of characters in a novel?

Barbara Mutch is the author of the recently-released novel The Housemaid’s Daughter. Born and raised in South Africa, she currently lives near London. She will be guest editing The Afterword all this week.

How do you design the rise and fall of characters in a novel?

Where it becomes tricky is when the author decides that a favourite character must die (witness the upheaval over the final Harry Potter book/movie). This has happened to me. One of the most poignant characters in The Housemaid’s Daughter is Phil, the son of the Irish family at the centre of the story. As I described in a previous post, the character of Phil was inspired by a real-life relative of mine. The fictional Phil, though, follows his own path in the novel, and this is where the trouble started.

Phil serves in North Africa during the Second World War, and returns to Cradock, South Africa, with “inside wounds” — what Ada’s mother says are the sort of wounds that don’t have blood. These days we recognise the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, but in Phil’s day it was poorly understood. “Shell shock” was the common expression at the time. You were meant to buck up and just snap out of it. But for Phil, like many others, this was to prove almost impossible. Of course, in Phil’s case, there was more to his illness. The world he returned to was different from what he’d left behind. The woman he loved was now beyond his reach.

And this is where it has become intriguing for me, as the author, because Phil’s death in the book has sparked a huge debate amongst my readers. At a recent book club meeting, I had to moderate between two factions who each held a determined view about his demise…